webb] ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF NORRIS BASIN 191 



appeared that such dwellings had only one door, and that was 

 usually located in the corner of the structure. 



The only furniture remaining on the dwelling-house floor was a 

 simple fire basin, or a burned area, usually near the center of the 

 structure. It is supposed that there were many more dwelling houses 

 than town houses on any site and one may wonder why, relatively, 

 so few dwelling-house sites were found. Since they were not neces- 

 sarily associated with any mounds, and were widely scattered, there 

 was nothing to mark their presence on a village site. For that rea- 

 son such dwelling house post-mold patterns were to be found only 

 as a result of trenching on a village site. Thus, since they were 

 somewhat widely scattered and left nothing conspicuous to mark 

 their location, the number reported from any site is probably small 

 as compared with the number which existed in that area. 



Town-House Sites 



Of the larger post-mold patterns, some 30 were regarded as "town- 

 house" sites. This designation was assigned because of their larger 

 size and because of their rather central location in the village sites. 

 Further, each of these "town-house" sites was marked by the pres- 

 ence of an earth mound varying in height from 1 foot to 10 feet. 

 This is taken to mean that the "town houses", at the time of their 

 construction, were covered with cane and grass and had a layer of 

 earth on their roofs. At the collapse of the structure the earth 

 formed a low mound, upon which another town house was often 

 erected. The larger mounds were thus formed by the building of 

 successive structures on a single site. From the meager evidence 

 still remaining, these town houses seemed to fall into two general 

 classes. For convenience, and merely to distinguish the two classes, 

 they may be called the "large-log" and the "small-log" type. In 

 many ways they are similar, but, as their names imply, they are to 

 be distinguished by the size of log used in their construction. As 

 will appear, this variation in the size of the logs used altered the 

 type of construction and indirectly produced other distinguishing 

 characteristics. 



The rectangular town house of the "small log" type was made of 

 logs not larger than 5 inches in diameter and usually as small as 3.5 

 inches at the base. They were set in the wall at a distance apart of 

 from one to one and one-half times their diameter. Thus the space 

 between the logs varied from about 4 to 8 inches. The method of 

 construction of the "small log" type of town house has been de- 

 scribed under Sites Nos. 2 and 5. (See pp. 10 and 38.) Structures on 

 Sites No. 2, No. 5, No. 6, No. 8, and No. 9 are of this type. 



